Dedication
By John Collings Squire, Sir
Lord, I have seen at harvest festival
In a white lamp-lit fishing-village church,
How the poor folk, lacking fine decorations,
Offer the first-fruits of their various toils:
Not only fruit and blossom of the fields,
Ripe corn and poppies, scabious, marguerites,
Melons and marrows, carrots and potatoes,
And pale round turnips and sweet cottage flowers,
But gifts of other produce, heaped brown nets,
Fine pollack, silver fish with umber backs,
And handsome green-dark-blue-striped mackerel,
And uglier, hornier creatures from the sea,
Lobsters, long-clawed and eyed, and smooth flat crabs,
Ranged with the flowers upon the window-niches,
To lie in that symbolic contiguity
While lusty hymns of gratitude ascend.
So I
Here offer all I have found:
A few bright stainless flowers
And richer, earthlier blooms, and homely grain,
And roots that grew distorted in the dark,
And shapes of livid hue and sprawling form
Dragged from the deepest maters I have searched.
Most diverse gifts, yet all alike in this:
They are all the natural products of my mind
And heart and senses;
And all with labour grown, or plucked, or caught.